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Barney Frank slams Newt Gingrich's ‘marital history’

Outgoing-Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) criticized the marital life of former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Wednesday while attacking Gingrich’s response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.

MSNBC anchor Rev. Al Sharpton asked for Frank’s response to Gingrich’s comments, when the former Republican speaker of the House told Cincinnati 55KRC radio: “When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know — I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.”

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Frank’s take?

“That’s just an example that Mr. Gingrich will say anything to get attention,” he said. “God appears to have been driven out of Mr. Gingrich’s private life if you look at his marital history. He’s very selective about where he thinks fundamental religious tenants ought to be followed. That is just such nonsense.”

He was referencing Gingrich’s admitted extramarital affair and marriage history.

Frank continued: “If you believe in God, you believe in omnipotent, omni-competent, omnipresent God. Saying that you can’t say a particular prayer in a particular building because there are a variety of people there – if anyone thinks that means an all-powerful God loses that influence, it’s sacrilegious.”

Sharpton did not play any more of Gingrich’s comments from the radio interview, in which Gingrich went on to say he supports outgoing-Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who has called to form a national commission on mass violence.

“Let’s ask a question about why have we become a society in which so many people have no faith in the future, no belief in themselves and in which they don’t see their fellow Americans as human beings, but they just see them as objects. Now I think that’s a national diaglogue that would be very healthy,” Gingrich told 55KRC.